Pinterest is not only a great marketing tool and a place from which we build our emotional wish list, gathering images of items for our home, garden, kids, weddings and ourselves; but it’s also one of the best places to find merchandising and design inspiration and top trends (or Pinspiration!).

Social media is ever-changing. What works one month might not work the next. That is why it’s important not to just keep up with the latest trends, but to have the foresight to know what is coming next.

It’s a new year, which means new trends in social media. Here are the top trends I expect to see in 2016.

1. Create Meaningful Content

There are now more than 40 million business pages on Facebook, meaning there’s a lot of noise and competition, making it hard to be seen by your fans and new customers.

Email marketing is a great way to bring customers into the store or get t hem to buy online. We’re finding higher conversion rates of people who were referred to a retailer by an email versus social media, showing the importance of using this digital marketing tool.

Collecting email addresses is also important because it builds a dependable platform, one that you own versus a non-dependable platform like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. At any time these non-dependable platforms can shut down, change so you have to pay for exposure or they could get hacked. If one day Facebook shut down completely, do you have your own database to market to, or would you have to completely start over?

If you own a brick-and-mortar store, one constant goal is to increase foot traffic and raise local awareness.

There are a lot of ways to get in front of people who live in your town or city, but often they’re either very hard to track the effectiveness (ROI - return on investment), and/or they can be very costly.

When it comes to Facebook Ads, there are three specific ads you can run to reach locals, and the great thing about using this platform to market is that you can track how many people saw the ad, clicked on it and even came in and made a purchase.

Ads are an important part to your success marketing on Facebook. Since organic (free) reach has dropped significantly over the past year and a half, you’ve got to pay to get more people to see and interact with your posts.

The good news is the Facebook Ads platform is extremely targeted, even allowing you to advertise to your current e-mail list or website traffic (called Custom Audiences). Before going over specific ad types, it’s important to really understand your goals. Why are you using Facebook ads? Here are some possible reasons:

By Crystal Vilkaitis, owner of Crystal Media, founder of Social Edge and RDI Diamond’s resident Social Media Expert

Instagram can be a great tool to boost exposure, connect with locals, drive traffic into your store and even sell merchandise. There are several ways to use Instagram, for example you can use the mobile app to edit photos or videos, connect with bloggers to gain free press, network with customers and find new ones, market research to see what trends and products consumers are wanting and for selling items in-store or online.